


live in the layers

by cosmicpoet



Category: Black Mirror (TV), Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 05:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17543963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: A short prequel to Bandersnatch, following the understanding, enlightenment, and bordering into four-dimensional meta of Colin Ritman.





	live in the layers

Colin wakes with a start to the sound of his radio playing _Electricity._ There’s something hanging in the air, it’s not quite _right;_ it feels like the day after something important. Like a festival one day after closing, the smell of weed and cigarettes and sweat hanging as last remnants of a memory. Still, he’s never been one to think too much - not until recently, at least, but he won’t allow himself to dwell on _that one_ for too long - and he can’t, not today.

Not _any_ day, really. Working at Tuckersoft gives him a lot of leeway to produce the content he’s always wanted to create, and the freedom given to him there is one of the only things that keeps him going back. Despite these feelings overwhelming him sometimes, like intense déjà vu or flashbacks of some repressed trauma, he can’t let himself get too caught up in his own mind that he’d lose his job over it. He’s far too contained for that.

_Metl Hedd_ burns a hole in his brain. Everything’s being coded just fine, but he’s been in the hole more often than not these days, with this brain fog taking up far too much space that could otherwise be used for something productive. 

When he’s at work, his hands whirring beyond the speed he even consciously thinks at, with his headphones on and Thakur not bothering him, he can get lost in the creation of it for just long enough that he doesn’t have any flashbacks.

Although, they’re not really flashbacks. They’re more like game restarts, and it confuses the hell out of him how he always feels an intense connection to people and places that he hasn’t ever known before.

**SAVE GAME | WRITE ANOTHER LINE OF CODE**

**…**

**…**

He’s on a roll. He doesn’t want to disrupt the flow he has going on, lest he find himself thinking too much about this strange feeling of external control. And then it happens. His computer crashes.

That’s it. Hours and hours of work, gone.

* * *

 

**+1**

Colin wakes with a start to the sound of his radio playing _Electricity._ Familiarity floods his body, seeping through his skin; the unnatural feeling of blood pouring back into a wound. He’s played the same tapes on the bus to work before, worn the same shirt on the same day, and yet he’s stuck in the ache of the fact that this is _supposed to be the first time._ He saves his game.

* * *

 

**+20**

It must be the same day again. Each morning, he’s waking up more and more breathless; his body feels like it’s going to fail him if he gets any more fragile. But…he’s the same as ever. The same as he was yesterday, in whatever timeline he was in back then. Slowly, answers had started to come to him, but they didn’t answer so much as broke his heart and tore him down through mutability to blind cynicism. It’s an aesthetic, at least. To keep up with the genius appearance and top himself off with a cold exterior - why bother having a conversation when you remember how it ends?

* * *

 

**+34**

The timeline, eventually, had started to fix its pieces back together. Sometimes, wrong decisions just led to consequences, and there were no second chances; sometimes, Colin would do something that he thought was right, only to come out of a daydream-haze earlier in the day, week, or month. But, time did, as should, move on.

Which means that this isn’t a problem of any sort of time loop.

He decides to write about it. Inspiration for a new game, after _Metl Hedd,_ at least.

_I think the more I split into a branching timeline, the less control others can have over me. Being blind my whole life to the nature of realities - parallel realities, even - and now having lived experiences, or, rather, experiences lived in another timeline, has opened my mind. The more the effect of external control disrupts the norm it deviates from, the less and less control that entity can exhibit upon you, because a side effect of this is the opening of the mind._

_I can see it. I can hear the numbers, flitting around. There isn’t a purpose to this. There are no save points, no assuredness - I can’t rely on any axis of control to choose what I should do, and it did begin to drive me mad. But I can use it. I can use this, or at least mould one of my lives to the right path._

_There’s things in my memory that I can’t have done. Deaths I haven’t died. Loves I haven’t loved. My life is, or, should be, my own, but there’s some puppet-master -_

Throwing the pen to the ground, he picks up a box on the side of his desk, dropping a tab of acid without a second thought. There are times of the mind being awake, of talking to itself and letting anyone controlling hear that they’ve been found out.

“I know there’s control…it’s fucking rooted all around us. Programmed into our games, wired into televisions; people paid to pretend they’re your family, drugs in your food. A million lifetimes flitting around the universe like snakes shedding continual skin, never ending circles pushing this idea of Program and Control. It’s a fucking nightmare world, but it’s not just one world, it’s roots spreading and infecting, poisoning one timeline to save another. There are things I remember. The feeling I’ve done this before.”

Yeah, that’s it. He’ll show them. Not by taking action, but by spitting in the face of those who think that they’re at least four walls away, that surely they can’t be found out for having controlled what must be like a video game character to them.

* * *

 

**+40**

And then…there’s Stefan Butler.

* * *

 

**+41**

And then…there’s Stefan Butler.

“We’ve met,” Colin says. Because they have. Because they will again.

“No…?” Stefan says.

So he’s new to this. And he’s got a game in mind - something called _Bandersnatch._ There are always correlations between fiction and reality, what’s right and what’s done, and this could lead somewhere.

Because the main storyline is out of Colin’s hands, now, he knows. Only Stefan can make the right choices.

* * *

_"Though I lack the art_   
_to decipher it,_   
_no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations_   
_is already written._   
_I am not done with my changes."  
 **Stanley Kunitz; The Layers**_

**Author's Note:**

> i smoked a joint then wrote this enjoy


End file.
